[ericclemmons]

Actually, I stumbled on an article recently noting that you can use the V8 pecl extension for running computationally-heavy code as JS from within PHP, rather than PHP code itself, to shave off some cycles.

A tool like this, with enough support, could allow you to easily convert large chunks of slower, PHP code (like object graph hydration) into JS, run in V8 for speed, and use the result in PHP without manually converting libraries.